Among Us has a long history in its rise to fame. The Associated Press labeled it the most downloaded app on the iOS store for October. A game so simple, so straightforward, yet executed with so much finesse. It also exploded into convenience when the population was starved of social interaction.
From famous personalities like streamers, public officials, and even those that don’t consider themselves gamers, this game strikes the sweet spot between ease of play, massive replay potential, and cross-platform compatibility.
You play a controllable jelly bean, perform some tasks, and find a hostile alien inside a spaceship crammed with other player-controlled jellybeans. Everyone loves and enjoys the game, the game called — Among Us.
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What is Among Us?
Among Us takes place in outer space, with core gameplay centered around finishing tasks as part of the crewmates, or eliminating crewmates as part of the imposters. There are three maps to choose from.
You can also play with up to 10 players per game with the option of choosing up to three imposters. If the default jelly bean astronauts aren’t to your liking, there are a variety of cosmetics you can decide from to give your crewmate a personalized flair.
For us to truly appreciate Among Us, we must first look into the game’s genre and the people behind it, but first, the genre—social deduction. Its goal is centered around the concept of “finding out,” and its main functions used to play are logic and deductive reasoning.
Pair this with multiplayer capability and the ability to communicate with other players in real time, and you get a humorous mix of loud, quiet, weird, but overall cerebral games.
The Rise to Fame
Released June 15, 2018, for mobile devices, its developer Innersloth and its three-person team in Marcus “PuffballsUnited” Bromander, Amy “aemuuu” Liu, and Forest “forte_bass” Willard. This trio has been in other InnerSloth projects, such as The Henry Stickman Collection and Dig2China.
On January 2020, Innersloth released a blog saying, “Among Us had a good run…” marking the supposedly End-of-life update. This reduced the prices of its maps, lessening the frequencies of bug fixes, and “…let Among Us take its natural course.”
It was in July 2020 when the game met its first wave of popularity. The prominent Twitch streamer Chance “Sodapoppin” Morris started playing the game. Even more, a runaway effect occurred in online personalities like PewDiePie, Pokimane, Shroud, and Ninja.
In August 2020, the player and viewer count of the game reached 100 thousand. It also had 4.2 million downloads of the game in September 2020, more than twice the recorded downloads for August.
Following the massive success, the game has garnered on streaming Websites such as Twitch, Innersloth had intentions of creating a successor to the original game, titled “Among Us 2,” which would be a massive improvement over its predecessor.
The End of Among Us
On September 24, 2020, Innersloth released a statement saying, “We have decided to cancel Among Us 2 and instead put all our focus into improving Among Us 1.” It meant that the developers would have to dramatically overhaul the game’s coding. They would also need to dedicate more time to maintaining and setting up servers and fixing the all-important bugs.
The most important aspect of this game, more than its appeal, is that it provided an avenue to unwind. This was also at a time when the coronavirus gripped the entire world. It provided a much-needed reprieve from the stresses of online classes and the lack of social interaction.
Innersloth netted a well-deserved Breakthrough Award in the recent 38th Golden Joystick Awards. Sit back, relax, and try to act clean, or the crew will send you into deep space with this cult classic turned global phenomenon. Among Us—are you sus?
